Like a bioterror crisis hot line, a new center in Livermore has become the nerve center for responding to the intentional or accidental release of a dangerous biological agent at public facilities across the country.

Sandia/California National Laboratories in Livermore will be at the other end of calls from managers of high-profile transportation hubs, such as airports, and other public places, ready to give critical information to help them deal with biohazards.

“In the immediate aftermath of one of these events, people aren’t going to know a lot right away,” said chemical engineer Nate Gleason, who heads the new BioWatch Indoor Reachback Center at Sandia. “We can make some useful information out of very little data.”

The center is part of the Department of Homeland Security’s BioWatch program which includes detectors that can sense dangerous biological materials at 30 transportation hubs and public places that are part of this program. When a detection alarm goes off, the emergency responders at that site can call Sandia for help with how to handle the situation.

Sandia scientists and engineers have models of each facility and the benefit of decades of research on how contaminants move through buildings. San Francisco International Airport has partnered with Sandia for some of this research.

The scientists also have access to a database of hundreds of thousands of potential attack scenarios.

Using information about the specific facility and what was released there, they can zero in on the most likely scenarios, giving responders a head start in determining what they may be dealing with and how to respond.

“We try to help them figure out where it came from and where it might be going in the facility,” Gleason said.

One of the first things the center can provide is a map of the facility with probabilities that the biological agent has spread to each area. Then responders at the facility know where to get samples of the agent and can begin to get a picture of where the line between contaminated and clean areas is located.

Back at Sandia, the new sampling information is used to refine the map further. This process can go on for hours or days, until the hazard is contained and the facility shut down.

Researchers said Sunday the mass die-off occurred because unusually large amounts of sea ice forced penguin parents to travel farther in search of food for their young. By the time they returned, only two out of thousands of chicks had survived.